behind his back.

And in this fashion he went out of view. Wolf waited for him to
reappear. He waited a long minute, silently, quietly, without movement,
as though turned to stone--withal stone quick with eagerness and desire.
He barked once, and waited. Then he turned and trotted back to Walt
Irvine. He sniffed his hand and dropped down heavily at his feet,
watching the trail where it curved emptily from view.

The tiny stream slipping down the mossy-lipped stone seemed suddenly to
increase the volume of its gurgling noise. Save for the meadow-larks,
there was no other sound. The great yellow butterflies drifted silently
through the sunshine and lost themselves in the drowsy shadows. Madge
gazed triumphantly at her husband.

A few minutes later Wolf got upon his feet. Decision and deliberation
marked his movements. He did not glance at the man and woman. His eyes
were fixed up the trail. He had made up his mind. They knew it. And
they knew, so far as they were concerned, that the ordeal had just begun.

He broke into a trot, and Madge's lips pursed, forming an avenue for the
caressing sound that it was the will of her to send forth. But the
caressing sound was not made. She was impelled to look at her husband,
and she saw the sternness with which he watched her. The pursed lips
relaxed, and she sighed inaudibly.

Wolf's trot broke into a run. Wider and wider were the leaps he made.
Not once did he turn his head, his wolf's brush standing out straight
behind him. He cut sharply across the curve of the trail and was gone.

THE SUN-DOG TRAIL

Sitka Charley smoked his pipe and gazed thoughtfully at the _Police
Gazette_ illustration on the wall. For half an hour he had been steadily
regarding it, and for half an hour I had been slyly watching him.
Something was going on in that mind of his, and, whatever it was, I knew
it was well worth knowing. He had lived life, and seen things, and
performed that prodigy of prodigies, namely, the turning of his back upon
his own people, and, in so far as it was possible for an Indian, becoming
a white man even in his mental processes. As he phrased it himself, he
had come into the warm, sat among us, by our fires, and become one of us.
He had never learned to read nor write, but his vocabulary was
remarkable, and more remarkable still was the completeness with which he
had assumed the white man's point of view, the white man's attitude
toward things.